Our role is to coordinate Voyage With Me. Our first term of sessions has ended with a full complement of women joining the group from two target areas in Norwich, supported by volunteers, including some who were participants on our previous EU funded project Living With Me. We have been looking at Sainsbury Centre collections and special exhibitions including Francis Bacon and the Masters, and making art in response, with underlying themes of home and away, souvenirs and memory. We meet again on 9th September after the summer break.

Change Minds. Explore, imagine and share tales of life in Norfolk with a mental health conditions, a hundred years ago and today.

Contributors: Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust, NSFT Inspire, University of East Anglia, Norfolk County Council Community Libraries, Belfry Arts Centre, The Forum Millllenium Library Norwich, House of Commons

Funder: Heritage Lottery Fund

Schedule: June 2015 – December 2017

Everything is in place for participants to join Change Minds on 1st October. Here is our recruiting leaflet. Our Project Board is established, our research programme is underway, we have a beautiful logo and website, and we have recruited our Coordinator. Our archives and wellbeing network is meeting in September with a view to developing a set of guidelines as we progress through Change Minds, and we are in touch with comparable or connected projects in other parts of the UK.

GROWING PROJECTS

Burgh Castle Almanac. Walking, recording and publishing for local people with complex needs at one of Britain’s greatest Roman forts

Contributors: Time and Tide Museum, Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust, University of East Anglia, The Forum Miillenium Library Norwich

Funder: Heritage Lottery Fund Landscape Partnership Scheme

Schedule: decision November 2015, development – 2017, delivery – 2020

Burgh Castle Almanac is within the Broads Authority’s £4 million Water, Mills and Marshes programme. Here is its latest newsletter. Clients of Stonham Homestay in Great Yarmouth and Waveney who are being supported to live independently walk around Burgh Castle every month for a year, recording archaeological and natural observations. At Time and Tide Museum they create a document of their work, the Burgh Castle Almanac. The project ends with an exhibition, publication and the Burgh Castle Progress, a Good Friday community walk along Angles Way reviving a traditional event in celebration.

Culture Quest. Music and art appreciation groups with people with mental health conditions living in supported housing in Norwich

Culture Quest (CQ) has been brewing since 2014. Dave Pullin, a musician, mental health nurse, group therapist and Together Support Worker, felt as I did that people living in Bakery Court and Devonshire Place in Norwich who love music and art would enjoy sharing enthusiaisms. We asked people for their views, and CQ was created as a fresh, safe yet stimulating way to enjoy art and music and cultural opportunities in Norwich.

Based in Norfolk and extrapolating evidence from urban and rural places to represent the wider world, 10 focus groups will inform our projects at seed, growing and operating stages because our primary purpose as an organisation is to ensure that participants, peer volunteers and volunteers have such a rewarding experience that they turn up regularly and commit to long term involvement with the project and our growing community of interest. Then enduring change can happen.

Living With Me Norfolk, creative adventure for women in Cromer, Kings Lynn and at Ashcroft Residential Support

Living With Me Norfolk is a development of our established Voyage With Me programme, with three independent but connected projects for local women with mental health conditions. LWM Cromer is about seafaring and life saving. LWM Kings Lynn is about life on the watery edge. LWM Ashcroft is about sanctuary. The programme is underpinned by VWM Knowledge, an academic health and wellbeing research and dissemination strand.

SEED PROJECT

Human Henge. Explore and test the mental health benefits of a 10-session therapeutic cultural experience of Stonehenge and its landscape.

The core Human Henge experience is of learning, imagining, dreaming and ritualising the meaning and mystery of Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site. Over 10 3-hour Culture Therapy sessions, one morning a fortnight in the Winter and Spring school terms, the group thinks with archaeologists and curators, walks the WHS landscape with pre-historians and performs their own Spring Equinox ritual. Evaluation research assesses Human Henge’s social and clinical impact, and shares our learning in order to mobilise the therapeutic potential of pre-historic sites and embed culture therapy in mental health provision.